I’ve been playing a lot of the new game Overwatch. As a first-person shooter with aspects of LoL, Team Fortress 2, and Call of Duty thrown in, it’s honestly a good game. (I didn’t think I would ever be saying that, as I despise Blizzard, the game company that made Overwatch, due to their policies, like shutting down private servers in World of Warcraft and generally prioritizing money over customer care and happiness.)
The ranked Competitive Mode was recently released for the game. Although it’s mainly focused around rewards instead of being good at the game, it’s an enjoyable system that has captured my interest. Still, it’s not without its faults. When the mode was first released, the system in which you would go up and down ranks was bugged, causing players to lose a whole rank on a lose and win only a small amount of points on a win. Since then, a hotfix was thrown into the game to solve these issues.
All bugs aside, Overwatch has proved to be quite the hit, and many see it as the one to finally dethrone LoL as the world’s most popular game. In Korean gaming cafes alone, popularity of LoL has dropped by almost 33 percent since Competitive Mode was released. Is this something that Riot Games, the creators of LoL, should be worried about? Yes, it is.
Overwatch has many different play modes; most focus around escorting a “payload” to an objective. These game modes give the most exp now and are some of the shorter and more fun modes to play. The more popular “capture the point” mode can take up to 45 minutes for one game.
With recent patches in LoL, the community, already known for being toxic, has started to shatter, with many players starting to look for another game to play. With Overwatch’s strong debut, gamers gravitated toward the new game very quickly. While it’s great to have a strong player base, one issue that arises due to this is that the community becomes more and more toxic as time passes. Will this affect Overwatch? We will see.